Beside the slightly different alphabet, what would strike people from Canada, the UK, and the US (and several other countries as well, I assume) as most unusual about a telephone directory in Iceland?

The use of first names rather than 'surnames' in listing distinguishes an Icelandic list of names, including that in the 'phone book.Otherwise there would be a confusing lot of -sens and -dottirs ! Icelandic children take the first name of their father and become [father's first name] -sen for sons and -dottir for daughters. So someone whose first name is Bjorn and whose father is Magnus Thorsen is called Bjorn Magnussen. His sister Kristin is Kristin Magnusdottir .

So , for simplicity, and by tradition ,Icelanders regard the first name as 'the name'

Got it, Fred. (And you, more than most, should easily get my other 'name' question today.)

quote:

Originally posted by DorianGreyed:
Got it, Fred. (And you, more than most, should easily get my other 'name' question today.)

Sorry: I think I could be better as PuliFred though! My breed, in plural are Pulik. Pedigree dogs like me are Kiskoras Fred or Bancroft Flossie, the surname being our registered breeder family name, though some of us are grander and Fred of (say) Westover and those of us who are taken to another family may be, say, Kiskoras Fred of Westover, and if we then are shown and owned by yet another family we are e.g Kiskoras Fred of Westover at Bancroft. Don't think any humans have gone that far !

No, but humans are coming closer, Fred. Decades ago, a male marrying into the Rothschild family added "-Rothschild" to his last name. In the 70s, when a girl of Macedonian descent and I talked about getting married and raising a family, I considered doing something similar (adding "-herlastname") to my last name.

(But, yes, you know the answer to the other question. I thought you would get it instantly. Jó munka!)

Rothschilds are nouveaux. English families have had double-barrelled names for a very long time, long before the Rothschilds. The reason was the same: two families joining where the bride's family was rich enough or powerful enough to expect that their surname be hyphenated with that of the bridegroom's.So someone surnamed Bromley-Davenport has ancestors from the Bromley and Davenport families who married. An alternative was to expect the same but only insist on it as a middle name for male children, and have no hyphen. A rich Scots family called Young are responsible for many a male initial Y .Those Britons are not called Yves: it's simply that they still carry the middle name Young which that family insisted on.